settled down, as the only escape from madness and suicide, into the latter thought and believed that she found in the ideal and perfect manhood of One whom she was told to revere and love as a God, and who had sacrificed His own life for her, a substitute for that merely human affection from which she was for ever debarred?  Why blame her for not numbering that which was wanting, or making straight that which was crooked?  Let God judge her, not we:  and the fit critics of her conduct are not the easy gentlemanlike scholars, like Mr. Vaughan’s Athertons and Gowers, discussing the “aberrations of fanaticism” over wine and walnuts; or the gay girl, Kate; hardly even the happy mother, Mrs. Atherton; but those whose hairs are gray with sorrow; who have been softened at once and hardened in the fire of God; who have cried out of the bottomless deep like David, while lover and friend were hid away from them, and laid amid the corpses of their dead hopes, dead health, dead joy, as on a ghastly battle-field, “stript among the dead, like those who are wounded, and cut away from God’s hands;” who have struggled drowning in the horrible mire of doubt, and have felt all God’s billows and waves sweep over them, till they were weary of crying, and their sight failed for waiting so long upon God; and all the faith and prayer which was left was “Thou wilt not leave my soul in hell, nor suffer thy Holy One to see corruption.”  Be it understood, however, for fear of any mistake, that we hold Mr. Vaughan to be simply and altogether right in his main idea.  His one test for all these people, and all which they said or did, is—­Were they made practically better men and women thereby?  He sees clearly that the “spiritual” is none other than the “moral”—­that which has to do with right and wrong; and he has a righteous contempt for everything and anything, however graceful and reverent, and artistic and devout, and celestial and super-celestial, except in as far as he finds it making better men and women do better work at every-day life.

But even on this ground we must protest against such a sketch as this; even of one of the least honourable of the Middle-age saints: 

ATHERTON.  Angela de Foligni, who made herself miserable—­I must say something the converse of flourished—­about the beginning of the fourteenth century, was a fine model pupil of this sort, a genuine daughter of St. Francis.  Her mother, her husband, her children dead, she is alone and sorrowful.  She betakes herself to violent devotion--falls ill—­suffers incessant anguish from a complication of disorders—­has rapturous consolations and terrific temptations—­is dashed in a moment from a seat of glory above the empyrean . . .